


Frozen in Amber

by kiss_me_cassie



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 08:58:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12908616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiss_me_cassie/pseuds/kiss_me_cassie
Summary: For Tori, the Josh to my Donna





	Frozen in Amber

**Author's Note:**

> For Tori, the Josh to my Donna

It isn't loud or sudden or violent. Not a gunshot wound or cancer or a massive heart attack. Instead, it's a handful of years with dementia that gets increasingly worse until one day, he just slips away in his sleep.

Donna can only be grateful that Cecy passed long before he ever started to forget.

Izzy comes home immediately, and Toby calls his Rabbi and helps with arrangements, and even Sam, whom he hadn't spoken with in ages, arrives in time for the burial.

They laugh and cry and hold one another tightly, sharing their grief over the man they both desperately loved and can't imagine living without. Andy brings casseroles and makes sure she sleeps, and CJ holds her hand tightly, and Toby sits stoically by her side throughout all the visits she has no interest in enduring.

President Bartlet calls, his health too frail to allow him to travel, and Mallory phones from England to share her childhood memories and stories of him and Leo and so many political foibles. 

Even the sitting Republican president calls, shocking Donna with how much he truly misses Josh. Never in his career has there been such a fierce political force to be reckoned with and, as shocking as it seems, this administration will miss him.

At the end of the week, Sam goes home, and Donna urges Izzy to go back to school with promises that Andy and Toby and CJ will continue to check in on her regularly. 

Time moves on and life resumes. A month passes, and then six. The President gets re-elected, but Congress gets shaken up, and bills on the Hill get passed and vetoed, and through it all, the world continues to turn.

And then it's a year and they all gather at his grave, and afterward everyone scatters, Andy taking Toby's arm and leading him away to the waiting cars, and Huck and Molly coaxing Izzy to go out for drinks. Donna is left alone.

And it's then that it hits her that he's gone, really gone, and Donna goes home and stands silently in the living room of their Georgetown townhouse, numb to everything.


End file.
